Janay Kelley
Interview with Donika Kelly
Donika Kelly is always looking. At her environment, at her loved ones, at time, she is always observing the way a naturalist would: intently in search of mystery and understanding. Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award, Kelly’s newest collection—The Natural Order of Things—captures moments of transformation and self-creation. Kelly explores the nature of humanness through lyrical investigations of love, language, and place, offering readers a record of belonging and a history of becoming.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: With The Natural Order of Things being your third book, why and when did you decide that you needed to write this book specifically?
DONIKA KELLY: I didn’t write the book. I wrote poems, and a couple of years ago, I thought I might have enough poems for a book. In the winter of 2023, I printed everything out and did the thing that poets do, which is put it on the floor and started sorting through what I had. Some poems seemed very clearly to be a part of something else, so I set those to the side. Then there were these other poems that made me think, “These might be speaking to each other. They might go together.” I set a target for sixty pages. I like a sixty-page book because you can just read the whole thing, you know? You’re in, and you’re out. In and out. I just started working. I had my guidelines, and I had the poems, and I just started sorting.
WSR: What were some of your guidelines?
DK: It was sixty pages, and I knew I didn’t want sections.
WSR: Why no sections? Are you over them? Think they’re overplayed?
DK: No, I don’t think they’re overplayed. I wanted it to feel a little bit more connected. And I think the sections suggest a kind of discreteness, right, a kind of like, “Oh, we’re gonna move from this to this to this.” For me, all of this is obviously super connected, so let me just see what I can do that might show that. There’s a thing that I really like to do, which is to have a first poem that’s set off from the collection and a last poem set off from the collection. And so I was trying to think: what might be the first poem? What might be the last poem? And then I just sort of worked between those two. It took the better part of 2023 to work on that manuscript. It was just like a lot of poems, right? So there were some from 2016, some when I lived [in New York], some I wrote in Iowa. A lot of the later poems I wrote in Iowa. After the book was accepted at the beginning of 2024, at Graywolf, I needed to go back through the manuscript. And so some poems came out, some newer poems went in. So that was fun. It was like a book that really spans about eight years. It feels really nice.
WSR: In the midst of writing all of these poems, you’re bouncing to new places; do you find your landscape or environment influences your writing?
DK: Location influences my work in that sometimes I end up longing for a location that I’m not in. A number of the poems that I wrote when I lived in Brooklyn, I found myself writing about Arkansas more because I was like, “I need some trees.” I can bring some of that with me in the poems. When I was in Iowa, I was still writing about Arkansas, but it was even more because Iowa is very white. It’s dry. Southern Arkansas is wet, very humid. Iowa—dry, dry, dry. The accent is dry. I like the people in Iowa. I like living there. It’s a perfectly fine place to live, but I felt I needed something a little bit more textured, a little bit more interesting to my ear. So I found myself in Iowa, in the winter especially, writing more about Arkansas in the summer. I was like, “I’m cold. It’s cold. The wind chill is negative thirty-five. It’s not cute. Not cute at all. Let me think about summer.” When I think about summer, I think about Arkansas. When I thought about Arkansas, I wanted to write about some good memories, you know––I think about my great-grandma. There are a lot of those poems that were written after moving to Iowa because my ear needed something that I wasn’t getting.
WSR: In this book, you do an amazing job reconnecting human beings to nature. A theme seems to be that we, too, are a part of nature; we are as much a part of nature as the trees. What are your thoughts on the role that nature plays in contemporary poetry?
DK: We’re in a really interesting moment in contemporary poetry, in writing about nature. There have been a few movements––the eco-poetic movement is one I’m thinking about in particular. Also, poems that directly address climate change and climate catastrophe. I think we’re, at this moment in American poetry, a little bit less inclined to think of nature as metaphor. I think there’s just like a push to do something that’s a little bit different. And it’s not that we aren’t using the natural world, the greater-than-human world, as metaphor. But I think there’s a really strong current that’s moving away from that. And I see it in my own work.
I would say the love poems that are early in The Natural Order of Things, I use nature as metaphor, because I don’t know how to explain how I feel inside. Can I turn to something outside of me? Is there something outside of the human that can help me understand this overflow of feeling, this great rush of feeling? So it’s a lot of turning to the ocean––the ocean’s very helpful with that. But I think later, I’m a little bit more observant. Geese get to just be geese. The mountain is just the mountain. The field is just the field. It’s not like a metaphor for something else. These are things that I can’t fully know, just as I can’t fully know another person, right? There’s a complexity there.
And that’s been conscious on my part, because it doesn’t feel as interesting or as good to use the natural world as metaphor. And I think I’m in community with a lot of other poets who are engaged with the natural world in this way. And I want to say, like Liz Bradfield in her new book Sofar and Brian Thierry as always. There are poets where it really does feel like we’re in the world, we are a part of it. Can we think about that in ways that aren’t extractive?
WSR: Speaking of extraction, can we talk a bit about AI and how you foresee its impact on the future of poetry?
DK: I have a lot of thoughts about, I mean, I have some very basic thoughts about that. In terms of the language learning models, which are not artificial intelligence. It’s like a statistical model, right? So the language learning models, part of what they do is offer the next best word. I think the reason it requires so much energy, in response to the prompt, is that each word is calculated as the next best word. It’s not like typing or thinking; it’s just surveying everything that it has been trained on, everything that’s been fed into it. And then it’s like, “What’s the next best word?”
I just said this to my class on Tuesday: the language learning model might produce text that reads, “At the end of my suffering / there was a door.” And that means nothing to me because I don’t know what the language-learning model’s suffering is. It doesn’t offer me anything, right? But Louise Glück writes it, and she’s doing a lot, but in The Wild Iris, that’s the first poem in the collection. Those are the opening lines of the first poem: “At the end of my suffering there was a door.” And I remember reading that for the first time and being like, yes, if I can get to the door, I can get out of this; my suffering is not always. But I don’t have that thought or feeling, if it’s a language learning model. Because it has no concept, it cannot conceptualize suffering; it has not experienced suffering, therefore, the text has nothing behind it. And what we go to poetry for is that sense of recognition. I think about the poems where I read them for the first time, and I was like, “Oh, you could do that,” or “Oh, I felt that way.” And that’s like, the poet has put that exactly, it’s not the way I would have said it, it’s not exactly my experience, but that is exactly the feeling. And I’m not going to get that from a language learning model because there is no feeling. There’s no experience. It’s a pile of text that it has sorted and is using a great deal of resources to then do a statistical analysis of each word, which again, I think is why it’s sucking up so much water and electricity. You know, and it’s not that I don’t suck up water and electricity––I do––but I don’t need that for every single word. I’d be consuming the same amount of water and electricity even if I weren’t writing poems.
WSR: Thank you for teaching me. I want to return to your love poems. Because they were so sweet and gentle. And I was like, oh, I love this. I can’t wait to be in love like this. I’m curious—what is it like to be a poet in love? And what do you think the contemporary world, art world period, has to say about the happy poet or the happy artist?
DK: That’s interesting. Okay, so to be a poet in love is perfect. [joint laughter]
In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson writes about Eros, and at the beginning of an erotic relationship, a sexual relationship, that longing and desire are so concentrated. It’s a very sensitive space in which to be. It’s like I want to merge with the beloved, but that would be so scary, but that’s what I want to do.
The love poem comes in at the place where there’s a desire; the lover has a desire for the beloved that cannot be met because there is something between the lover and the beloved. The love poem is always from the perspective of the lover. It seems like it might be about the beloved, but it’s actually about the lover and the lover’s relationship to what’s between. It’s just great—lots of different kinds of temperatures like [Carson] talks about––hot and cold. It’s scalding, it’s freezing. We’re deregulated in the space of the love poem, so it’s a kind of extremity that’s fun to write out of. It’s also why we get such great breakup poems, because that’s another kind of extremity.
So to be a poet in love is delightful. One challenge that I’ve experienced is how do you keep writing about being in love once the chaos of eros has chilled out a little bit. You can’t live in eros. It’s very unstable, very destabilized, very dysregulated. Once it’s settled into something else, how do you write about that? For this book, the beloved is not just a romantic partner. The poems about my grandma, my great grandma, and my grandpa are love poems. The poems for my friends are kinds of love poems. We don’t always look for those poems, but I love that right now we’re in a moment where people write about their friends and friendship.
Danez Smith is obviously very clearly a poet interested in friendship. I would also say Derrick Austin in his book Tenderness, Jennifer Chang’s An Authentic Life. I really like that we have more friend poems because that’s important. That’s what I was talking about earlier—getting out of that rut of like, what is it acceptable to write about.
To the question of the happy poet: I don’t know what people do with it. What I’ve been told and what I have observed, especially in a poet’s first book, is that they want your trauma. That was a moment—I mean, I think that’s always been true, like a hunger for a kind of extremity of feeling. But I think lots of poets have written books that are like, “I’m just a person piddling along.”
In Elisa Gonzalez’s first book Grand Tour, there’s a little bit of an autobiographical feeling. I don’t know if it’s actually autobiographical, but there’s an autobiographical feeling in the book about some difficult times. I can’t speak to all the details, but there are some more challenging feelings in the book, alongside other kinds of feelings, so I think there’s more room for the poet, the writer, the artist, as someone who’s like, “okay.” I think that ends up being more interesting when it’s writers who are from identities that have been, or from backgrounds that have been marginalized, it’s like, “Oh, this person’s okay,” and I find that really helpful because like, I need hope, I need hope that is going to be alright.
WSR: While we’re still on the topic of love, are there any similarities between making love and making a poem?
DK: I think there can be. It’s the poems that are written out of what I think of as the magic place. The poems that we lose ourselves in the writing of, and then we come out, and we’re like, “Oh my god, what is this?” The poems that we are like, this is really good, and I don’t know where this came from.
I mean, I had such a fun time writing, “It’s Gone Be What It Is.” I was at a reading with Patricia Smith. I had had a very strong chai, and I was on the moon, which was amazing, and I just realized that I could just make the sounds that please me, and some of the really important sounds that please me is the language of my family, really beautiful, and so I was just like, “we say,” and that refrain of “we say,” I get to go back into my family history in a way that doesn’t feel super traumatizing. In the writing, I was just going, and it felt so amazing.
I wrote a poem earlier this year, after I saw this dance performance. I felt so moved, and I can tell you in a minute who the dancer was; he’s a MacArthur-winning choreographer who came to Iowa and did this dance performance. It was gorgeous. I was like, “Art!” I gotta write a poem, I wanna write a poem, and I wrote a poem, and I got to the end of that poem, and it was that feeling. So I think, insofar as making love (I love this phrase, making love) and writing a poem are similar, I think both can bring us closer to ourselves, closer to our bodies, away from the rut, away from this is how you’re supposed to be, this is what you’re supposed to do, into a different kind of understanding, how do I understand with my body what is in my mind that I might not be aware of.
WSR: Now, in your poem, “It’s Gone Be What It Is. One of my favorite things about, as you call it, Black American English is our mixing up the tenses, like bridging the past and the present. What do you make of time, not only in this work, but just in the way that you think about poetry and your own poetics?
DK: Okay, I’m thinking of this Jane Hirschfield essay that I teach, which is “Poetry in the Mind of Concentration.” And early in that essay, she talks about poetry as a kind of time machine. Or it’s like, I’ve written something, the poet has written something, and a hundred years later, we’re speaking it, right? Twenty years later, we’re speaking it. Two hundred years later, we’re speaking it. And so we bring it forward into time, but we are also traveling back into time. So there’s like a little portal or a channel that’s open in the space of the poem. And I love that. I love the way that the lyric poem manipulates time––dilates it, compresses it, sometimes both at the same time. It’s like, this is a sonnet, but I feel like I was in a galaxy for a minute. It’s really amazing. Again, it feels like a measure of manipulation in the sense of how we change things with our hands, right? Like that to manipulate, not like to trick. But some people like it that way. But I’m really thinking about that manipulation as in, “How do I turn it like in my hand?”
So in “It’s Gone Be What It Is,” I’m interested in the way that words are spelled, but then there’s also how we say the words. I remember we moved to Arkansas when I was thirteen and my cousin Sherry was like, “I tried to told you.” And there’s something about that. Tenses are kind of all over the place, you know? “I tried not to tell you,” right? It’s like, I tried to, but also I told you. Like “I tried to help you out.” It’s not just I tell you, it’s like, I told you, but I couldn’t because you didn’t let me. I tried, you didn’t listen, right? And so I just love the way that she says that.
In “It’s Gone Be What It Is,” part of what I’m interested in is how even if the language in the poem is not standard American English, it’s grammatically different, we still understand what’s being communicated. And I feel really invested in that, which is like a little bit of a resistance to the hierarchy of standard American English. Most people don’t speak standard American English, whatever their race, whatever their ethnicity, whatever their background. We have little inflections and infractions and little shifts in tone and verbs. And that’s delightful. Can we celebrate? Can we celebrate that? I think so.
WSR: I think so, too. What is your strategy when it comes to form?
DK: For some poems it’s like: write a sonnet, right? Maybe I’ll write a sestina. What does that look like? A lot of the time, I just sit down to write, and the shape comes after. One of my questions for the poem is: why this shape? Or what shape does the poem want to be? And every time I change the shape, I read the poem out loud, and it’s like tuning my ear and my eye to what it seems the poem wants to do. Does the poem want to be slow? Does the poem want to be fast? Are there parts of the poem that want to be more visible than other parts of the poem? That’s over twenty years of practice.
WSR: You have a lot of self-portraits in here. It’s one of your sequences. What is the process of writing a self-portrait?
DK: The self-portraits often come from the title. I’m trying to understand something about how I’m feeling or how I felt in a moment. And the self-portrait is, in addition to the poem being an apparatus or a structure that fixes in time, the self-portrait is a very specific kind of apparatus or structure that fixes in time, tight? It sets.
I like the “Self-Portrait with Friend.” I’m not going to do too much. I’m not going to show you my friend. It’s just, how do I feel when I’m with my friend? In a way, I think of acknowledging that there’s something between, you know? I can’t show you my friend, exactly, but I can show you what we do when we’re together and how that makes me feel, which then gives me, but also maybe a reader, a sense of that friendship.
WSR: One of the things that draws me as a reader to your poetry is the way that you are able to find poetry in everyday-ness, like things that we consider mundane. How does everyday-ness find its way into your poetry? Would you say that it belongs there? Is it an intention that you set for it to be there?
DK: Some of my favorite poets really give the everyday. Lucille Clifton, cutting greens, right, just this is what it’s like to do this. Marie Howe, very much a poet of the everyday. And then Mary Oliver, who has been very, very important to me, who has encouraged me to pay more attention to the world around me and be a little bit more present. There’s a lot of books where Mary Oliver has seen a deer, and yet, it is the thing that happens when people see deer.
I find being curious about every day makes the everyday much more interesting. You live in a place right now where there’s a lot of weird stuff happening. And there’s a lot of sensory information here. We might feel inclined here to shut down some of our senses so that we can move through the space without feeling completely overstimulated, but then it’s important we make a choice to let a little in. And I think that’s as true here as it is anywhere else, right? Can I be alive to my surroundings? Can I be connected to my surroundings? My life has been so much more interesting because I know that tree is probably a sugar maple because the leaves are red in the fall. Oh, the leaves are gold, and they’re kind of big. That’s probably an oak. And it’s just from observing and like putting it in a poem. And then every moment after that, I’m like, “The oaks are getting yellow, the leaves are gold. It’s fall.” It helps me keep track of my life in a different kind of way, you know?
WSR: That’s the true natural order of things.
DK: That’s right. That’s the truth.
Donika Kelly is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The Natural Order of Things. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa.